Abby smiled and shook her head.
‘In that case, I’m going to get pissed and have a go myself. You never know, Anna, I might end up bringing a plus-one to your wedding after all.’
As they watched Suze approach the handsome stranger, Abby couldn’t help but feel a spark of admiration for her friend, so hopeful in her quest for true love.
Anna folded her arms on the edge of the table.
‘People make mistakes, Abby. I don’t think it’s so bad to forgive,’ she said quietly.
‘Whose side are you on here?’ Abby said briskly, then stopped herself, not wanting to be unkind to Anna, who these days she considered her closest friend, the one she felt she had most in common with, the one she knew she could turn to in a crisis. Had turned to, in the days after her separation, when Anna had spent hours on the phone with her, not judging, just listening.
‘I’m on your side, Abs,’ said Anna, putting her hand on her forearm. ‘I just know how much you love Nick. How much he loves you and how good you were together.’
‘Before he broke my heart,’ said Abby softly.
Anna rooted around in her bag and pulled something out. ‘Here’s Matt’s business card,’ she said, pushing a sliver of embossed white card her way. Anna’s fiancé was one of London’s top divorce lawyers. Abby knew of a dozen other ways to contact him, through Facebook, email, LinkedIn, which she had felt very grown-up joining in recent weeks. Matt was her mate; she could just phone him up if she wanted to speak to him. But there was a gravity in Anna’s gesture that made Abby appreciate that this was the rest of her life they were dealing with.
‘You know how good he is,’ added Anna. ‘But if it’s all a bit embarrassing, he’s got a couple of amazing associates who could act for you . . . if you’re sure that’s what you want.’
The thought of it made Abby sick. Selling the house, splitting the assets, never seeing Nick again.
She closed her eyes, imagining how much she would miss his presence in her life, even those terrible recent text messages begging for forgiveness. Nick Gordon might have broken her heart, but he had been the love of her life, and the idea of never seeing him again, never hearing his voice was almost too much to bear.
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Anna, draining her glass.
‘I’ve got a lot of thinking to do,’ replied Abby quietly.
It was the understatement of her life.
Chapter Three
Abby wasn’t in the mood for work. To be honest, she hadn’t been in the mood for work for quite a while now, but this morning as she walked up Exhibition Road from the tube, she was dreading it more than usual. She took a sip of her latte, hoping it would go some way to clearing her head, but it didn’t seem to be working. The sunshine kept glinting off the windscreens of cars, and despite her oversized sunglasses, the light and the noise and the after-effects of the night before were making her head pound like a drum. What had possessed her to go out for drinks in the middle of the working week? She wasn’t nineteen any more; she couldn’t bounce back from a hangover the way she had done at university.
She crossed the road, narrowly missing being hit by a white van. The driver blared his horn at her and yelled something out of the window.
‘Big night?’
She almost dropped her coffee as she turned to see a beaming face.
‘Lauren! You nearly gave me a heart attack,’ she gasped.
‘Sorry, but you were miles away. Thinking about all those cocktails you drank last night, were you?’
Abby was momentarily thrown by the accuracy of her friend’s assessment. There had always been an air of the mystical about Lauren Stone, the Institute’s librarian, although much of it was by design. The boho smocks and purple tights, the geeky glasses and the obsession with horology – it was all carefully stage-managed to distract from the fact that Lauren was both beautiful and super-bright.
‘Sun’s gone in,’ she said, nodding towards Abby’s sunglasses.
‘I’m feeling a bit fragile.’
‘So what was last night’s occasion?’
‘Just a girls’ night out. A lot of bitching about how crappy men are, and more Pimm’s than is healthy or sensible.’
‘Good for you,’ said Lauren, putting her hand in her bag and pulling out a banana. ‘There you go. Potassium.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Don’t worry, I have an entire bunch of them in here.’ Lauren grinned. ‘I have a monster hangover too.’